J. S. Hodson, Printer, Cross Street, Hatton Garden.
A LETTER, &c.
My Lord and Gentlemen,
THE contemplated addition of a railway to your line of conveyance, induces me to solicit the honour of your attention to a method of effecting your object, which may, perhaps, prove the cheapest and best you can adopt.
From the statements of the gentlemen who gave explanations on the subject at the meeting, your object appears to be, to effect some method of communication between your basin at Kensington, and some point of the Grand Junction Canal, and the proposed London and Birmingham Railway, which may enable you, either to take advantage of the Grand Junction Canal as a channel to convey and receive goods to and from, or of the proposed railway to Birmingham; so that you may be able to convey passengers to and from that railway, and to and from the western parts of town, should it be put into operation.
Your present line being a water line, I should, were it not for the intervention of the high ground which is between your basin and the Grand Junction Canal, recommend the extension of this water line; because an additional expenditure of 900l. or 1000l., to provide a couple of the gigs by which passengers are now conveyed at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour along the Paisley and Ardrossan Canal, would then enable you to carry any number of passengers to and from the Birmingham Railway considerably faster, and many times cheaper, than omnibuses, &c. &c. would convey them to and from the town end of that railway.
But as the numerous locks, which the height of that ground renders necessary, would occasion the loss of all the time which the newly-discovered method of rapid conveyance on canals might save, the extension of your present line appears to be incompatible with your object of rendering such extension adapted to the rapid conveyance of passengers, as well as goods at the usual rate.
This impediment is not, however, the only circumstance which would make me pause in recommending the extension of your canal. It is publicly stated that the estimated expense of extending your canal the two and a half miles you contemplated was 150,000l.; while this would not be the sole expense attending it.
Owing to there being no water to supply the waste of the numerous locks which you must construct, to raise barges to the height you wish to surmount, you would have, in addition to extending your canal, to be also at the expense of laying down large water-pipes all along it; and of erecting steam-engines, and pumps, to raise up from the Thames, every drop of the water you would require to lower your barges down to it. The first cost of doing this would be very considerable: since, in addition to the steam-engines, pumps, and two and a half miles of large pipe which you must lay down, you must also be at the expense of purchasing ground at the end of your proposed extension, for the site of, and excavating the earth to form, a large reservoir, for the water to be pumped up into to supply the locks.
Great, however, as would be the first cost of thus providing water to work the proposed extension of your canal, yet would this first cost be less important than the current expenses of it; since for every barge that passed through your canal, you would have to pump above two hundred tons of water, nearly 100 feet high: than which, nothing can be conceived more contrary to principles of economy; it being tantamount to having to lift a whole hundred weight up, every time you extended your hand to put a quarter of a hundred weight down. Were it necessary that those two hundred tons of water should be pumped only when you raised a barge up with (or by means of) them, it would not be so vexatious.